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A creative approach for undergraduate nursing students to learn anatomy and physiology: a qualitative exploratory study

  • Michael S. Barbagallo ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Joanne E. Porter , Amany Abdelkader and Ainsley James
Published/Copyright: June 11, 2022

Abstract

Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) courses in undergraduate nursing programs are often considered challenging for students. Typically, a wide variety of teaching strategies, including dissection, experiments, illustrations and photographs are used to engage students. This study aimed to explore and describe the learning experiences of an open creative assessment task on undergraduate nursing students of learning A&P. A total of eight students participated in semi-structured interviews. Two major themes emerged from the data, this included ‘Bringing A&P to life’ which included two sub-themes of ‘Learning through peer teaching’ and ‘An easy way to learn’, with the second major theme, ‘Custom made learning’ which included four sub-themes, ‘To grade or not to grade’, ‘Catering for different learning styles’, ‘Logistics of group work’, and ‘Effect of group dynamics’. This qualitative exploratory study contributes to further pedagogical insights into art and/or creative approaches to teaching.


Corresponding author: Dr. Michael S. Barbagallo, PhD, BSc (Hons), Institute of Health and Wellbeing, Federation University Australia, Churchill Campus, Victoria, Australia, Phone: +61 3 51228604, E-mail:

  1. Research funding : None declared.

  2. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission. Author 1 was responsible for the study conception and development. Author 2 was responsible for the data collection. All authors contributed to the data analysis and drafted manuscript. Author 1 made the final revisions to the paper and submitted.

  3. Competing interests: Authors state no conflict of interest.

  4. Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individuals included in this study.

  5. Ethical approval : This research related to human use has complied with all the relevant national regulations, institutional policies, and in accordance with the tenets of the Helsinki Declaration and has been approved but the authors’ Institutional Review Board or equivalent committee (Federation University Human Ethics Committee, Project number B17-022).

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Received: 2022-02-03
Accepted: 2022-05-30
Published Online: 2022-06-11

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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